As I sit in the evenings, I often drop notes to myself over into the basket. In fact, I have a Mickey Mouse composition book that I write notes of things that I hear on the TV, or read in the paper or remember from work.

Nobody ever looks in my basket – not that I know of, at least – so I pretty much put what I want to in the basket and write whatever I please in my MM book.

About six months ago, I wrote, “If “Two and a Half Men” gets any more indecent, I’ll have to stop watching.

And I did for a while, but one evening last week I turned to “Two and a Half Men”

Now I used to really like that TV show. When it first came on, it was funny and the kid was cute. But no more.

After a few minutes, I grabbed up my Mickey notebook and a pen and started writing down the “off-color” stuff that was said.

After a while, I gave it up and, in fact, tore the pages up because I didn’t want anybody to chance upon them and think that I actually watched it.

That’s not the only show that thinks they have to dig in the dirt to get viewers, but it’s about the worst one to my thinking.

Sobeit.

While I had the Mickey Mouse composition book out, I started scanning through it, and came upon several things that I had written down over the last couple of years, for no particular reason other than they caught my fancy.

Some of the quotes came from the TV, some came from a book I might be reading at the time, from a song, and some came from my children, neighbors or friends.

Let me share some good stuff with you. Some of it came from I-don’t-know-where. But I liked the sound of it.

“Nothing fixes something in the memory like the wish to forget.”

I can surely vouch for that, whoever said it.

“The man with no money is poor, but the man who has nothing but money is poorer.”

I don’t know just where this came from, but the dollar sign seems to be at the forefront of just about everything we do nowadays.

“You get what you pay for.” I’d argue with that one. It just is not always the case.

Page 2 of 2 - “He prayeth best who loveth best, all things both great and small …” I had scribbled this on the inside cover of my Mickey book. Someone said it on TV, and it was familiar to me, but I couldn’t think where it came from. So I had to look it up in Bartlett’s.

It’s from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I remembered then that we – my class in high school – had to memorize a great lot of that poem.

“… sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” Another favorite of mine. I scribbled it in the Mickey book one night when I couldn’t sleep.

I will be forever grateful to Mrs. Nancy Isley, who taught us literature at Pleasant Grove, for making us memorize lines from some of the great writers. One of those memorized lines often comes to me … yes, yes, even after all this time.

I remember that YKW used to hold the literature book while I tried to memorize and recite.

One more, and I’ll let you go.

Who else but Sir Winston Churchhill could have said, “When going through hell, keep going!”